Adrianne Haslet-Davis, a survivor of the Boston Marathon bombing, has this essay in Time with the above title.
There is another essay in Time that has numerous misleading assertions in it that I will refute when I have time.I hadn't put a lot of thought into the death penalty until I was lying on a sidewalk on Boylston Street two years ago. There, then, I believed that I was going to die and that my husband was already dead. But we're still alive. I lost my leg below the knee; both of his legs were wounded. We are lucky.
When I woke up in the hospital, I decided not to use the name of the person on trial for the crimes against the two of us and more than 260 other people, including four murder victims, one of whom was 8 years old. Part of posttraumatic stress disorder is the feeling of losing control: one minute you're holding your husband's hand in beautiful, sunny Boston; the next, your life is changed forever. The killer never wanted to learn my name, so why should I learn his?And I also decided early on that the death penalty was the verdict that I wanted for him. I believe in my heart of hearts that he knew exactly what he was doing the moment before he did it, and possibly months before that. Among other horrific charges, he used a weapon of mass destruction to intentionally harm and kill people.
Decency evolves: The people who do the work do have a different perspective. In his recent book, Bryan Stevenson recalled an evening when, after talking by phone to a mentally impaired condemned inmate on the evening of his execution, he encountered the feeling that he couldn’t keep representing capital clients:
“On the phone with Mr. Dill, I thought about all of his struggles and all
of the terrible things he had gone through and how his disabilities had
broken him. There was no excuse for him to have shot someone, but it
didn’t make sense to kill him. I began to get angry about it. Why do we
want to kill all the broken people? What is wrong with us, that we can
think a thing like that can be right? . . . .
When I hung up the phone that night, I had a wet face and a broken heart.
The lack of compassion I witnessed every day had finally exhausted me. I
looked around my crowded office, at the stacks of records and papers, each
pile filled with tragic stories, and I suddenly didn’t want to be
surrounded by all this anguish and misery. As I sat there, I thought
myself a fool for having tried to fix situations that were so fatally
broken. It’s time to stop. I can’t do this anymore.
For the first time I realized that my life was just full of brokenness. I
worked in a broken system of justice. My clients were broken by mental
illness, poverty, and racism. They were torn apart by disease, drugs and
alcohol, pride, fear, and anger . . . .
My years of struggling against inequality, abusive power, poverty,
oppression and injustice had finally revealed something to me about myself.
Being close to suffering, death, execution and cruel punishments didn’t
just illuminate the brokenness of others; in a moment of anguish and
heartbreak, it exposed my own brokenness. You can’t effectively fight
abusive power, poverty, inequality, illness, oppression or injustice and
not be broken by it.
We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been
hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is
not equivalent. I desperately wanted mercy for Jimmy Dill and would have
done anything to create justice for him, but I couldn’t pretend that his
struggle was disconnected from my own. The ways in which I have been
hurt—and have hurt others—are different from the ways Jimmy Dill suffered
and caused suffering. But our shared brokenness connected us.
Paul Farmer, the renowned physician who has spent his life trying to cure
the world’s sickest and poorest people, once quoted me something that the
writer Thomas Merton said: We are bodies of broken bones. I guess I’d
always known but never fully considered that being broken is what makes us
human. We all have our reasons. Sometimes we’re fractured by the choices we
make; sometimes we’re shattered by things we would never have chosen. But
our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our
shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability
and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion.
We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing.
Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny
our own humanity.
I thought of the guards strapping Jimmy Dill to the gurney that very hour.
I thought of the people who would cheer his death and see it as some kind
of victory. I realized they were broken people, too, even if they would
never admit it. So many of us have become afraid and angry. We’ve become so fearful and vengeful that we’ve thrown away children, discarded the
disabled, and sanctioned the imprisonment of the sick and the weak—not
because they are a threat to public safety or beyond rehabilitation but
because we think it makes us seem tough, less broken. I thought of the
victims of violent crime and the survivors of murdered loved ones, and how
we’ve pressured them to recycle their pain and anguish and give it back to
the offenders we prosecute. I thought of the many ways we’ve legalized
vengeful and cruel punishments, how we’ve allowed our victimization to
justify the victimization of others. We’ve submitted to the harsh instinct
to crush those among us whose brokenness is most visible.
But simply punishing the broken—walking away from them or hiding them from
sight—only ensures that they remain broken and we do, too. There is no
wholeness outside of our reciprocal humanity.
I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling
and despairing over their situations—over the things they’d done, or had
done to them, that led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really
bad, and they were questioning the value of their lives, I would remind
them that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. I told
them if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take
something that does not belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if
you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. I told myself that evening
what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In
fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness,
because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and
perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t
otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to
recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.
All of a sudden, I felt stronger. I began thinking about what would happen
if we all acknowledged our brokenness, if we owned up to our weaknesses,
our deficits, our biases, our fears. Maybe if we did, we wouldn’t want to
kill the broken among us who have killed others. Maybe we would look
harder for solutions to caring for the disabled, the abused, the neglected,
and the traumatized. I had a notion that if we acknowledged our
brokenness, we could no longer take pride in mass incarceration, in
executing people, in our deliberate indifference to the most vulnerable.
When I was a college student, I had a job working as a musician in a black
church in a poor section of West Philadelphia. At a certain point in the
service I would play the organ before the choir began to sing. The
minister would stand, spread his arms wide, and say, ‘Make me to hear joy
and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice.’ I never
appreciated what he was saying until the night Jimmy Dill was executed.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption
"Broken" or simply evil?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Allen_Davis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_E._Duncan_III
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westley_Allan_Dodd
http://en/wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Garavito
Likely both depending on your perspective. I've been doing capital habeas cases for about 20 years and have seen serious mental illness and trauma as a routine part of my practice. My clients strike me as quite broken. Mere mental illness, even severe psychosis, does not guarantee that and inmate won't be sentenced to death or executed:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/death-penalty-cases-mental-illness-clemency
Is it your opinion that, regardless of the depravity and wickedness of the unremorseful murderer's acts and the innocence and vulnerability of his young child victim(s), that capital punishment is always morally wrong if there is any evidence that the murderer has some DSM-5 mental diagnosis?
Or have I misstated your position?
It's my position that government use of homicide as a means of punishment for incarcerated prisoners is wrong. That belief is informed, as Bryan Stevenson's is, not merely by belief but by my own experience. When the State is trying to execute your schizophrenic client, your client who was sexually and physically abused as a pre-adolescent, your client who was represented by a disbarred alcoholic attorney, or tried by a prosecutor who hid strongly impeaching evidence or intentionally excluded all black jurors from an all white jury on account of race, it makes the issue especially poignant. It accentuates the wrongness of what is happening. We can do better and life in prison really should be sufficient.
We've tried and failed to humanize capital punishment. Justice Blackmun grew tired of tinkering with the machinery of death. For now, the Nebraska Legislature has had enough. I hope that over time, that will happen all over this nation. David Von Drehle's article In Time suggests that as a practical matter, that is in fact what is occurring, at least outside the former confederacy.
http://time.com/deathpenalty/
The problem is that your narrative focuses on the killer as a broken or sick person, while making (what I view as) careless, sprawling and overdrawn accusations about the deficiencies of others.
Both emphases miss the mark.
First, while they are sometimes true in some instances, your portrayal of them as suffusing every or nearly every case of capital murder is incorrect.
Second, their bias is heavy-handed. You show nothing but compassion for the killer while painting everyone else in as harsh and unforgiving a light as you can find.
Third, even if your premises were correct, they do not yield the conclusion you want. That some killers find mitigation some of the time is hardly a reason to give 100% mitigation to capital defendants 100% of the time.
The rate of executing factually innocent people is zero, so far as any neutral body has determined in more than 50 years. But in any event, the risk of executing an innocent person is vanishingly small by any sensate standard, even if we toss in Cantu and Willingham.
As I have noted before, society takes vastly larger risks of violently ending innocent lives every single day, simply because the gains we get by assuming those risks outweigh the costs. This is not to mention war, whose undertaking receives nothing approaching the scrutiny given death penalty cases, but whose costs in innocent life dwarf, not just the death penalty, but the entire criminal justice system.
Byron Stevenson is a gentleman, a thoughtful person, and a man it's impossible not to like (from the times I've run into him). And he makes a not insubstantial aesthetic case against the death penalty. But the American public and the SCOTUS have it right on the legal and moral cases, and those are the ones that tell the tale.
For some atrocities, the DP is the only punishment that fits the crime. At the end of the day, trumps everything else.